I haven't blogged for awhile for a number of reasons. I have much to share about my trip in Shandong, and the vineyards I visited. But I'm up to my ears in deadlines so that will have to wait.

Another reason I haven't written is that I've been floored by the news in Sichuan, I place I once lived and a part of China I love very much. I frequently travelled to Dujiangyan, close to the epicenter, and often slept on the slopes of Qingcheng mountain, which appears to lie near the very core of this horrible earthquake. I will always remember that place fondly, though my friends (some of whom were actually staying there, on the mountain, during the disaster) tell me that the teahouses and nong jia les where we once stayed are flattened. So are the temples that dot the hillsides there, apparently.

Below is an opinion piece I wrote after the quake, which I'll share with you here. I'll write more about my culinary adventures later. Until then, be safe, and do whatever you can to help out in Sichuan.

Worlds Collide

On Monday afternoon, in Shanghai, my dog leapt up and ran around the room like he was chasing a ghost. As I typed I felt my chair sway, and I thought, for an unsteady second, that the earth might have moved beneath me. Then I decided that I had probably drunk too much coffee, and returned to my work.

Thirty minutes later, reports of a 7.9 magnitude earthquake flashed across my screen. I was afraid and anxious. Chengdu was only 59 miles from the epicenter; Chengdu is a place I once used to live; and Chengdu is one of the kindest, easiest cities in China. Cell phone towers collapsed under the tremors so I couldn’t reach my friends there; I now know they are safe. But I fear that other people I’ve met in the Sichuan countryside, people that did much to shape my perception of the place, are probably not.

Six years ago I rode a rickety bus from Chengdu to Dujiangyan. This city, only an hour outside Sichuan’s capitol, is now buried beneath piles of recently poured concrete. Dujiangyan is not a beautiful place; though before all the factories, motorbikes and boxy apartment blocks, I’m sure that it was.

Sitting beside me on that bus was a construction worker named Du. His hair was combed slick, his shirt pressed and buttoned to the top, and his black loafers spit-polished. His obvious curiosity manifested itself in a close, awkward stare – to ease our nerves I struck up conversation. He was open and kind, this man who was returning home to see his family for the first time in a year. He had been everywhere in China: Beijing, Xinjiang, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Lhasa. During all that traveling, he explained, he had never left the construction site.

When we got to the city, which lies on the fringe of a mountain range that jumps up out of the smoky Sichuan Basin, the compact construction worker managed to secretly slip the bus driver my fare. This was embarrassing; after all, I managed to spend more on dinner than he might in a month. But he beamed. As a sort of compensation, he asked me to get on the back of a motorcycle and follow him to meet his newly-born daughter. I obliged, even though this was the first time he too would see her face. I was taken aback by the intimacy of the gesture. But that happens a lot in this part of China, to people like me.

At their home I took a tour of the local fields and their fish pond, and I held his four month old daughter as she blew bubbles from fat, wind-burned cheeks. We ate a carp, deep-fried and spicy, and the pungent local greens they plucked along a narrow dirt path that served as their road. It was a perfect afternoon, dry and not too hot, and as I made my way up the mountain I promised to return. I would come again to meet their beautiful daughter, whom Du promised would call me uncle the next time I arrived.

I returned many times to Dujiangyan, and to Qingcheng Shan, the bamboo carpeted mountain that looms over the city. The fault lines under that mountain, where the great Tibetan plateau smashes into China, are the ones that have shaken this country to its core. But I never made it back Du’s home.

These past several months have been a divisive time for many of us living in China; one that I’ve had a difficult time reconciling in my mind. The nationalism that has washed over this place in ugly waves has been a dehumanizing thing. For the Chinese, the West’s unflattering perception of China has also been a threatening, bewildering phenomenon. And as the political and cultural divide has widened, many of us have forgotten that we’re all people. Innately kind, curious, hopeful people. The kind that might pay for a stranger’s bus ticket, and invite him home to hold his newborn daughter.

I’m eternally grateful that I had that chance.